III
In the four border states the proportion of slaves and slaveowners was less than half what it was in the eleven states that seceded. But the triumph of unionism in these states was not easy and the outcome (except in Delaware) by no means certain. Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri contained large and resolute secessionist minorities. A slight twist in the chain of events might have enabled this faction to prevail in any of these states. Much was at stake in this contest. The three states would have added 45 percent to the white population and military manpower of the Confederacy, 80 percent to its manufacturing capacity, and nearly 40 percent to its supply of horses and mules. For almost five hundred miles the Ohio river flows along the northern border of Kentucky, providing a defensive barrier or an avenue of invasion, depending on which side could control and fortify it. Two of the Ohio's navigable tributaries, the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, penetrate through Kentucky into the heart of Tennessee and northern Alabama. Little wonder that Lincoln was reported to have said that while he hoped to have God on his side, he must have Kentucky.
Control of Maryland was even more immediately crucial, for the state enclosed Washington on three sides (with Virginia on the fourth) and
12. Ibid., 200, 265.
13. Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession, 510–11.
its allegiance could determine the capital's fate at the outset of the war. Like the lower South, Maryland had voted for Breckinridge in the presidential election. Southern-Rights Democrats controlled the legislature; only the stubborn refusal of unionist Governor Thomas Hicks to call the legislature into session forestalled action by that body. The tobacco counties of southern Maryland and the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay were secessionist. The grain-growing counties of northern and western Maryland, containing few slaves, were safe for the Union. But the loyalty of Baltimore, with a third of the state's population, was suspect. The mayor's unionism was barely tepid, and the police chief sympathized with the South. Confederate flags appeared on many city homes and buildings during the tense days after Sumter. The traditional role of mobs in Baltimore politics created a volatile situation. Only a spark was needed to ignite the state's secessionists; such a spark hit the streets of Baltimore on April 19.
On that day the 6th Massachusetts Regiment—the first fully equipped unit to respond to Lincoln's call for troops—entered Baltimore on its way to Washington. No rail line passed through Baltimore, so the troops had to detrain at the east-side station and cross the city to board a train to the capital. A mob gathered in the path of the soldiers and grew increasingly violent. Rioters attacked the rear companies of the regiment with bricks, paving stones, and pistols. Angry and afraid, a few soldiers opened fire. That unleashed the mob. By the time the Massachusetts men had fought their way to the station and entrained for Washington, four soldiers and twelve Baltimoreans lay dead and several score groaned with wounds. They were the first of more than 700,000 combat casualties during the next four years.
Maryland flamed with passion. Here was coercion in deadly earnest. Worst of all, the soldiers who had killed Baltimore citizens were from the blackest of Black Republican states. To prevent more northern regiments from entering Baltimore, the mayor and the chief of police, with the reluctant approval of Governor Hicks, ordered the destruction of bridges on the railroads from Philadelphia and Harrisburg. Secessionists also tore down telegraph lines from Washington through Maryland. The national capital was cut off from the North. For several days, rumors were the only form of information reaching Washington. They grew to alarming proportions. Virginia regiments and armed Maryland secessionists were said to be converging on the capital. Washington was gripped by a siege mentality. Citizens' groups and government clerks formed themselves into volunteer companies. At General Scott's orders, these units sandbagged and barricaded public buildings and prepared the imposing Treasury edifice for a last-stand defense.
Reports filtered through of an aroused North and of more regiments determined to force their way through Maryland at any cost. But the rumors of an impending attack by Virginians seemed more real than the hope of rescue from the North. Lincoln looked wistfully out of the northern windows of the White House and murmured, "Why don't they come?" On April 24 he visited the officers and wounded men of the 6th Massachusetts. "I don't believe there is any North," Lincoln gloomily told the soldiers. "The [New York] Seventh Regiment is a myth. Rhode Island is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities."14
But next day a troop train carrying the crack New York 7th puffed into Washington, followed by more trains bearing additional regiments from northeastern states. They had arrived over a circuitous route via Annapolis under the command of Benjamin F. Butler, who thereby achieved one of the few military successes of his contentious career. A clever lawyer and shrewd politician whose paunchy physique, balding head, drooping mustache, and cocked left eye gave him a shifty appearance that matched his personality, Butler was a Massachusetts Democrat soon to become a Republican. From Governor Andrew he had wrested an appointment as brigadier general of the militia that Andrew had mobilized upon Lincoln's call for troops. The 6th Massachusetts had been the first regiment of this brigade to leave for Washington. When Butler, following with the 8th Massachusetts, learned of the riot in Baltimore and the burning of railroad bridges, he detrained the 8th at the head of Chesapeake Bay, commandeered a steamboat, and landed the regiment at Annapolis. The 8th Massachusetts contained several railwaymen and mechanics in its ranks. Finding that secessionists had ripped up tracks and destroyed rolling stock on the line from Annapolis to Washington, Butler called for volunteers to repair the rusting derelict of a locomotive he found in the Annapolis yards. A private stepped forward: "That engine was made in our shop; I guess I can fit her up and run her."15 Setting a pattern for the feats of railroad construction that helped the North win the war, Butler's troops and the 7th New York reopened the line over which thousands of northern soldiers poured into Washington.
14. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 11.
15. Nevins, War, I, 85.
Although Baltimore remained tense, the buildup of Union military strength along Maryland's railroads and a declaration of martial law in the city on May 13 dampened secession activities. Nevertheless, Governor Hicks succumbed to pressures to call the legislature into session. Lincoln considered sending troops to arrest disunionist legislators, but thought better of it. To the president's surprise, the legislature turned out to be all bark and no bite. The lower house denounced the war which "the Federal Government had declared on the Confederate States" and proclaimed Maryland's "resolute determination to have no part or lot, directly or indirectly, in its prosecution." At the same time, however, the legislature refused to consider an ordinance of secession or to call a convention to do so. In effect, the legislators accepted Governor Hicks's recommendation of "a neutral position between our brethren of the North and of the South."16
As a means of avoiding a difficult choice, "neutrality" was a popular stance in the border states during the first weeks after Sumter. But given Maryland's strategic location and the thousands of northern soldiers stationed in the state or passing through it, neutrality soon became an impossible dream. Indigenous Maryland unionism began to assert itself. The state's economic health was based on rail and water connections with the North. President John W. Garrett of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was a firm unionist and offered the railroad's facilities to carry troops and supplies from the West. Unionist candidates won all six seats in a special congressional election on June 13. By that time the state had also organized four Union regiments. Marylanders who wanted to fight for the Confederacy had to depart for Virginia to organize Maryland regiments on Confederate soil.
Union officials nonetheless continued to worry about underground Confederate activities in Baltimore. Army officers overreacted by arresting a number of suspected secessionists and imprisoning them in Fort McHenry. One of those arrested was a grandson of Francis Scott Key, who had written "The Star Spangled Banner" when the fort was under British fire a half-century earlier. Another was John Merryman, a wealthy landowner and lieutenant in a secessionist cavalry unit that had burned bridges and torn down telegraph wires during the April troubles. Mer-ryman's lawyer petitioned the federal circuit court in Baltimore for a
16. Lincoln to Winfield Scott, April 25, 1861, in CWL, IV, 344; Dean Sprague, Freedom under Lincoln (Boston, 1965), 31–32; Rhodes, History of the U.S., III, 275–76.
writ of habeas corpus. The senior judge of this court was none other than Roger B. Taney,17 who on May 26 issued a writ ordering the commanding officer at Fort McHenry to bring Merryman before the court to show cause for his arrest. The officer refused, citing Lincoln's April 27 suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in portions of Maryland.
This confrontation became the first of several celebrated civil liberties cases during the war. Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution stipulates that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus "shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." In a circuit court ruling on May 28, Taney denied the president's right to suspend the writ. The provision authorizing the suspension, he pointed out, appears in the article of the Constitution specifying the powers of Congress; therefore only Congress can exercise the power. Moreover, Taney continued, the Constitution does not authorize the arrest of civilians by army officers without the sanction of civil courts, nor does it permit a citizen to be held in prison indefinitely without trial.18
The Republican press denounced Taney's opinion as a new species of proslavery sophistry. Lincoln refused to obey it. Several prominent constitutional lawyers rushed into print to uphold the legality of Lincoln's position. The particular location of the habeas corpus clause in the Constitution was irrelevant, they maintained; suspension was an emergency power to be exercised in case of rebellion; the president was the only person who could act quickly enough in an emergency, especially when Congress was not in session. The whole purpose of suspending the writ, said these legal scholars, was to enable army officers to arrest and detain without trial suspected traitors when civil authorities and courts were potentially sympathetic with treason, as in Baltimore.19
In his message to the special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln took note of the Merryman case. The president considered his primary duty to be the suppression of rebellion so that the laws of the
17. Under the organization of the federal court system at that time, the Supreme Court Justice from each of the nine circuits served also as the presiding judge of the circuit court.
18. Ex parte Merryman, 17 Fed. Cas. 144.
19. "Opinion of Attorney General Bates, July 5, 1861," in O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 2, pp. 20–30; Reverdy Johnson, Power of the President to Suspend the Habeas Corpus Writ (New York, 1861); Horace Binney, The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus under the Constitution (Philadelphia, 1862).
United States could be executed in the South. Suspension of the writ was a vital weapon against rebellion. "Are all the laws, but one [the right of habeas corpus], to go unexecuted," asked the president rhetorically, "and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?"20Whatever the respective merits of Taney's and Lincoln's positions, Taney commanded no troops and could not enforce his opinion, while Lincoln did and could. Merryman was released after seven weeks at Fort McHenry and indicted in the U. S. circuit court, but his case never came to trial because the government knew that a Maryland jury would not convict him.
While lawyers continued to argue, the army arrested the Baltimore police chief, four police commissioners, and several prominent citizens for their roles in the April 19 riot and their alleged continuing subversive activities. More was yet to come. After Confederate victory in the battle of Manassas on July 21, secessionists in Maryland became bold again. A special session of the legislature in August rang with rhetoric denouncing the "gross usurpation, unjust, tyrannical acts of the President of the United States."21 By the time another extra session was scheduled to meet on September 17, the administration was alarmed by reports of a plot for a simultaneous Confederate invasion of Maryland, insurrection in Baltimore, and enactment of secession by the legislature. Lincoln decided to take drastic action. Union troops sealed off Frederick (where the legislature was meeting) and arrested thirty-one secessionist members along with numerous other suspected accessories to the plot, including Mayor George Brown of Baltimore. All were imprisoned for at least two months, until after the election of a new legislature in November.
Not surprisingly, this balloting resulted in a smashing victory for the Union party. After the election, prisoners regarded as least dangerous were released upon taking an oath of allegiance to the United States. Most of the rest were released on similar conditions in February 1862. A few hard cases remained in prison until all Maryland political prisoners were freed in December 1862. Although Lincoln justified the prolonged detention of these men on grounds of "tangible and unmistakable evidence" of their "substantial and unmistakable complicity with those in armed rebellion," the government never revealed the evidence
20. CWL, IV, 430.
21. Jean H. Baker, The Politics of Continuity: Maryland Political Parties from 1858 to 1870 (Baltimore, 1973), 58.
or brought any of the prisoners to trial. Some of them, probably including Mayor Brown, were guilty of little more than southern sympathies or lukewarm unionism. They were victims of the obsessive quest for security that arises in time of war, especially civil war.22
A thousand miles to the west of Maryland, events equally dramatic and more violent marked the struggle to keep Missouri in the Union. Dynamic personalities polarized this struggle even more than the situation warranted. On one extreme stood Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, a proslavery Democrat and onetime leader of the border ruffians. On the other stood Congressman Francis P. Blair, Jr., whose connections in Washington included a brother as postmaster general and a father as an adviser of Lincoln. Blair had used his influence to secure the appointment of Captain Nathaniel Lyon as commander of the soldiers stationed at the U. S. arsenal in St. Louis—the largest arsenal in the slave states, with 60,000 muskets and other arms in storage. A Connecticut Yankee and a twenty-year veteran of the army, Lyon was a free soiler whose intense blue eyes, red beard, and commanding voice offered better clues than his small stature to the zeal and courage that made him an extraordinary leader of men. Lyon had served in Kansas when Claiborne Fox Jackson had led proslavery invaders from Missouri. In 1861 the Lyon and the Fox once again faced each other in a confrontation of greater than Aesopian proportions.
In his inaugural address as governor on January 5, 1861, Jackson had told Missourians: "Common origin, pursuits, tastes, manners and customs . . . bind together in one brotherhood the States of the South. . . . [Missouri should make] a timely declaration of her determination to stand by her sister slave-holding States."23 The lieutenant governor, speaker of the house, and a majority of the controlling Democratic party in the legislature took the same position. The unionism of the state convention elected to consider secession had frustrated their hopes. In the aftermath of Sumter, however, Jackson moved quickly to propel Missouri into the Confederacy. He took control of the St. Louis police and mobilized units of the pro-southern state militia, which seized the small U. S. arsenal at Liberty, near Kansas City. On April 17, the same
22. CWL, IV, 523; Sprague, Freedom under Lincoln, chaps. 16–18; Charles B. Clark, "Suppression and Control of Maryland, 1861–1865," Maryland Magazine of History, 54 (1959), 241–71.
23. William E. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 (Columbia, Mo., 1963), 6–7.
day that the governor spurned Lincoln's call for troops, he wrote to Jefferson Davis asking for artillery to assist in the capture of the St. Louis arsenal. On May 8 several large crates labeled "marble" but containing four cannons and ammunition arrived in St. Louis from Baton Rouge—where earlier they had been seized from the federal arsenal in that city. The artillery soon appeared in a grove on the edge of St. Louis, "Camp Jackson," where the southern militia was drilling.
Blair and Lyon matched Jackson's every move. Lyon mustered into federal service several regiments organized by the German American population, the hard core of unionism in St. Louis. To reduce the danger of secessionist capture of surplus arms in the arsenal, Lyon and Blair arranged for the secret transfer of 21,000 muskets across the river to Illinois. Word of the plan leaked out, and an excited crowd gathered at the wharf on the evening of April 25. Lyon decoyed them by sending a few boxes of ancient flintlock muskets to a docked steamboat where an Illinois militia captain pretended to wait for them. The mob seized the boxes and triumphantly bore them away. At midnight the 21,000 modern muskets crossed the Mississippi on another steamboat.
Lyon was not content to remain on the defensive and allow passions to cool, as conditional unionists advised. He decided to capture the 700 militiamen and their artillery at Camp Jackson. On May 9 he made a personal reconnaissance by carriage through the camp disguised in a dress and shawl as Frank Blair's mother-in-law. The next day he surrounded Camp Jackson with four regiments of German Americans and two companies of regulars. The militia surrendered without firing a shot. The shooting started later. As Lyon marched the prisoners through the city, a raucous crowd lined the road and grew to dangerous size. Shouting "Damn the Dutch" and "Hurrah for Jeff Davis," the mob threw brickbats and rocks at the German soldiers. When someone shot an officer, the soldiers began firing back. Before they could be stopped, twenty-eight civilians and two soldiers lay dead or dying, with uncounted scores wounded. That night mobs roamed the streets and murdered several lone German Americans. Next day another clash took the lives of two soldiers and four civilians.
Panic reigned in St. Louis, while anger ruled the state capital at Jefferson City, where the legislature quickly passed Governor Jackson's bills to place the state on a war footing. The events in St. Louis pushed many conditional unionists into the ranks of secessionists. The most prominent convert was Sterling Price, a Mexican War general and former governor, whom Jackson appointed as commander of the pro-southern militia. Missouri appeared headed for a civil war within its own borders. Moderates made one last effort to avert fighting by arranging a June 11 conference between Jackson and Price on one side and Blair and Lyon (now a brigadier general) on the other. Jackson and Price offered to disband their regiments and prevent Confederate troops from entering Missouri if Blair and Lyon would do the same with respect to Union regiments. After four hours of argument about these terms, Lyon rose angrily and declaimed: "Rather than concede to the State of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my Government in any matter . . . I would see you . . . and every man, woman, and child in the State, dead and buried. This means war."24
Lyon was as good as his word. Four days after this conference he occupied Jefferson City. Price's militia and the legislature abandoned the capital without resistance. They withdrew fifty miles up the Missouri River to Boonville, where Lyon relentlessly pursued and drove them from the town on June 17 after a skirmish with few casualties. Price's defeated forces retreated all the way to the southwest corner of Missouri by early July, with the unionists close on their heels. Lyon became the North's first war hero. With little outside help he had organized, equipped, and trained an army, won the first significant Union victories of the war, and gained control of most of Missouri.
But he had stirred up a hornets' nest. Although guerrilla bands would have infested Missouri in any case, the polarization of the state by Lyon's and Blair's actions helped turn large areas into a no-man's land of hit-and-run raids, arson, ambush, and murder. Confederate guerrilla chieftains William Quantrill, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, and George Todd became notorious bushwhackers. Their followers Jesse and Frank James and Cole and Jim Younger became even more famous—or infamous—after the war. Unionist "Jayhawker" counterinsurgency forces, especially the Kansans led by James Lane, Charles Jennison, and James Montgomery, matched the rebel bushwhackers in freebooting tactics. More than any other state, Missouri suffered the horrors of internecine warfare and the resulting hatreds which persisted for decades after Appomattox.
None of this fighting dislodged Union political control of most of the state. This control was exercised in a unique manner. The governor and most of the legislature had decamped. The only unionist body with some claim to sovereignty was the state convention that had adjourned
24. Thomas L. Snead, The Fight for Missouri from the Election of Lincoln to the Death of Lyon (New York, 1886), 199–200.
in March after rejecting secession. On July 22, therefore, a quorum of the convention reassembled, constituted itself the provisional government of Missouri, declared the state offices vacant and the legislature nonexistent, and elected a new governor and other state officials. Known as the "Long Convention" (to establish the analogy with the Long Parliament of the English Civil War), the convention ruled Missouri until January 1865, when a government elected under a new free-state constitution took over.
Meanwhile Claiborne Jackson called the pro-southern legislature into session at Neosho near the Arkansas border. Less than a quorum showed up, but on November 3, 1861, this body enacted an ordinance of secession. The Congress in Richmond admitted Missouri as the twelfth Confederate state on November 28. Although Missouri sent senators and representatives to Richmond, its Confederate state government was driven out of Missouri shortly after seceding and existed as a government in exile for the rest of the war.
Nearly three-quarters of the white men in Missouri and two-thirds of those in Maryland who fought in the Civil War did so on the side of the Union. Kentucky was more evenly divided between North and South; at least two-fifths of her white fighting men wore gray. Kentucky was the birthplace of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Heir to the nationalism of Henry Clay, Kentucky was also drawn to the South by ties of kinship and culture. Three slave states and three free states touched its borders. Precisely because Kentucky was so evenly divided in sentiment and geography, its people were loath to choose sides. A month after Lincoln's call for troops, the legislature resolved that "this state and the citizens thereof shall take no part in the Civil War now being waged [but will] occupy a position of strict neutrality."25
Kentuckians took pride in their traditional role as mediator between North and South. Three times Henry Clay had devised historic sectional compromises: in 1820, 1833, and 1850. In 1861 Clay's successor John J. Crittenden had tried to devise a fourth. Even as late as May 1861, Kentucky unionists still believed that Crittenden's compromise offered the best hope to save the Union. Governor Beriah Magoffin appealed to the governors of the three midwestern states on Kentucky's northern border for a conference to propose mediation between the warring parties. He sent emissaries to Tennessee and Missouri for the same purpose. If all six states formed a united front, thought Magoffin, they
25. Lowell Harrison, The Civil War and Kentucky (Lexington, 1975), 9.
could compel North and South to make peace. But the Republican midwestern governors, busy mobilizing their states for war, refused to have anything to do with the idea, while Tennessee soon made its commitment to the Confederacy. A border states conference held in Frankfort on June 8 attracted delegates from only Kentucky and Missouri. They adjourned in futility after passing unnoticed resolutions.
In theory, neutrality was little different from secession. "Neutrality!!" exclaimed a Kentucky unionist in May 1861. "Why, Sir, this is a declaration of State Sovereignty, and is the very principle which impelled South Carolina and other States to secede." Lincoln agreed—in theory. But he, like other pragmatic unionists, recognized that neutrality was the best they could expect for the time being. The alternative was actual secession. For several weeks after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Breckinridge Democrats filled the state with rhetoric about southern rights, solidarity with sister states, and the like. Thousands of Kentuckians began filtering into Tennessee to join Confederate units. Although Governor Magoffin formally rejected Jefferson Davis's call for troops as he had rejected Lincoln's, Magoffin sympathized with the South and secretly permitted Confederate recruiting agents to enter the state. Even some Kentucky unionists declared that if northern soldiers tried to coerce the South, "Kentucky should promptly unsheath her sword in behalf of what will then have become her common cause." Sensitive to the delicate balance of opinion in his native state, Lincoln assured Kentucky unionist Garrett Davis on April 26 that while "he had the unquestioned right at all times to march the United States troops into and over any and every State," he had no present intention of doing so in Kentucky. If the state "made no demonstration of force against the United States, he would not molest her."26
Lincoln carried this promise to the extreme of allowing an immense trade through the state to the Confederacy. Horses, mules, food, leather, salt, and other military supplies, even munitions, entered Tennessee via Kentucky. Many Yankees denounced this trade (even as others quietly counted their profits from it). Midwestern governors and the army soon halted most river shipments by placing armed steamboats and artillery along the Ohio River. But the Louisville and Nashville Railroad continued to haul trainloads of provisions from Kentucky to Confederate supply centers in Tennessee. Even though Lincoln had declared a blockade
26. E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill, 1926), 92, 44; CG, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 82–83.
of Confederate ports, he hesitated to impose a land blockade against Kentucky lest he violate her "neutrality." Not until August 16, after state elections had shown that unionists were in firm control of Kentucky, did Lincoln issue a proclamation banning all trade with the Confederacy. Even this did not entirely halt the trade, but at least it made such commerce illegal and drove it underground.27
Lincoln's forbearance toward Kentucky paid off. Unionists became more outspoken, and fence-sitters jumped down onto the Union side. The legacy of Henry Clay began to assert itself. Unionist "home guard" regiments sprang up to counter the pro-southern "state guard" militia organized by Governor Magoffin. Union agents clandestinely ferried 5,000 muskets across the river from Cincinnati to arm the home guards. Ken-tuckian Robert Anderson, of Fort Sumter fame, established Union recruiting camps for Kentucky volunteers on the Ohio side of the river to match the Confederate camps just across the Tennessee line. At a special election on June 20, unionists won more than 70 percent of the votes and gained control of five of Kentucky's six congressional seats.28 This balloting understated pro-Confederate sentiment, for many southern-rights voters refused to participate in an election held under the auspices of a government they rejected. Nevertheless, the regular election of the state legislature on August 5 resulted in an even more conclusive Union victory: the next legislature would have a Union majority of 76 to 24 in the House and 27 to 11 in the Senate.
This legislative election marked the beginning of the end of neutrality in Kentucky. Military activities along the state's borders soon forced the new legislature to declare its allegiance. Several northern regiments were stationed in Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. An equally large Confederate force occupied northwest Tennessee, fewer than fifty miles away. Key to the control of the Mississippi
27. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 73; CWL, IV, 486–87. Lincoln's proclamation was an implementation of legislation enacted July 13, 1861, forbidding trade with the Confederate states.
28. Most states held their congressional elections in the fall of even-numbered years, as they do today. But because a congressman so elected would not take his seat until thirteen months later, some states, including Maryland and Kentucky, held congressional elections in the odd-numbered year in which that Congress was scheduled to meet. Because Lincoln had called the 37th Congress into special session on July 4, 1861, Maryland and Kentucky had to hold special elections in June, a fortuitous circumstance that gave unionists in both states a chance to demonstrate their majorities and consolidate their control.
between these two forces was the high bluff at the rail terminal of Columbus, Kentucky. Both rival commanders cast covetous eyes on Columbus, and each feared—correctly—that the other intended to seize and fortify the heights there.
The Confederate commander was Leonidas Polk, tall and soldier-like in appearance, member of a distinguished southern family, a West Point graduate near the top of his class who had left the army in 1827 to enter the ministry and rise to a bishopric of the Episcopal church. When war came in 1861, he doffed his clerical robes and donned a major general's uniform. An officer of high reputation, Polk never measured up to his early military promise and did not survive the war. The opposing Union commander was Ulysses S. Grant, slouchy and unsoldier-like in appearance, of undistinguished family, a West Point graduate from the lower half of his class who had resigned from the army in disgrace for drunkenness in 1854 and had failed in several civilian occupations before volunteering his services to the Union in 1861. "I feel myself competent to command a regiment," Grant had diffidently informed the adjutant general in a letter of May 24, 1861—to which he received no reply.29 Grant's commission as colonel and his promotion to brigadier general came via the congressman of his district and the governor of Illinois, who were scraping the barrel for officers to organize the un-wieldly mass of Illinois volunteers. A man of no reputation and little promise, Grant would rise to the rank of lieutenant general commanding all the Union armies and become president of the United States.
Polk moved first to grasp the prize of Columbus. On September 3, troops from his command entered Kentucky and occupied the town. Grant responded by occupying Paducah and Smithland at the mouths of the strategically crucial Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Both sides had invaded Kentucky, but by moving first the Confederates earned the stigma of aggressor. This converted the legislature from lukewarm to warlike unionism. On September 18 the American flag rose over the capital and legislators resolved by a three to one margin that Kentucky having been "invaded by the forces of the so-called Confederate States . . . the invaders must be expelled."30 Governor Magoffin and Senator Breckinridge resigned to cast their lot with the Confederacy. Other Kentuckians followed them. On November 18 a convention of two hundred delegates passed an ordinance of secession and formed a provisional government,
29. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York, 1885), I, 239.
30. Edward Conrad Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York, 1927), 301.
which the Congress in Richmond admitted as the thirteenth Confederate state on December 10. By the end of the year 35,000 Confederate troops occupied the southwest quarter of Kentucky, facing more than 50,000 Federals who controlled the rest of the state.
War had finally come to Kentucky. And here more than anywhere else it was literally a brothers' war. Four grandsons of Henry Clay fought for the Confederacy and three others for the Union. One of Senator John J. Crittenden's sons became a general in the Union army and the other a general in the Confederate army. The Kentucky-born wife of the president of the United States had four brothers and three brothers-in-law fighting for the South—one of them a captain killed at Baton Rouge and another a general killed at Chickamauga. Kentucky regiments fought each other on several battlefields; in the battle of Atlanta, a Kentucky Breckinridge fighting for the Yankees captured his rebel brother.